George W. Bush - now and then...

[The Duke]

I voted for Bush, and as much as I hate the guy at this point, I cannot honestly say that Kerry or Gore would have done better.  In fact, I'm quite sure they would have done worse.  So I can't really say I regret my vote so much as I regret my options.

[The Duke]

Do you honestly think Kerry or Gore would have prematurely announced their support for a failed coup in Venezuela (which, if you go back, was the beginning of our problems with Chavez)?

The coup was not the beginnning of our problems with Chavez.  After all, if we had no problems with Chavez, why would anyone support the coup?  Obviously there were problems with Chavez before the coup, or there would not have been a coup at all!

I think Chavez is a cheap demagogue and a wannabe dictator who has steadily eroded basic liberties in Venezuela.  I oppose him and I want a President that does as well, and I'd rather have a President who does the right dthing poorly than does the wrong thing well.

Do you think Al Gore would have supported the invasion of Iraq?

No, and since I supported the invasion I see no reason to think this makes Gore better.

Do you think Kerry or Gore would have allowed Congress to do whatever without challenging it with a veto or 2?

Actually, I think Congress would be even more inclined to run amok.  With a Gore or a Kerry who actively encourages their spendthrift ways, of course the budget would be in worse shape.  Never trust a Democrat to run a budget unless the Democrat's name is Bill Clinton.

FEMA under Bill Clinton was hailed as a great success.  You would have to believe that Gore or Kerry would have recruited veterans from that team who would have handled Katrina A LOT better.

I think this is a bit of fantasy.  There were two reasons Katrina was such a disaster:

1) A hurricane hit a city that was 20 feet below sea level.
2) First repsonders abandoned their posts.

FEMA can't stop either of those things.  Mike Brown is a dope, but even a managerial genius would have wilted under the circumstances.  Bush's FEMA did just fine handling three hurricanes hitting Florida in one season in 2004.  Managerial competence is not the issue, scale of the disaster is the issue and anyone who thinks Katrina would have turnd out differently if only a Democrat had been President is holding a belief based totally on faith.

Blaming Bush for Katrina is like blaming Doc Rivers for the Celtics poor win loss record.  Doc Rivers may be a crummy coach, but that isn't the reason the Celtics are losing.

John Kerry said during the campaign that he wanted to grow the military and Bush poo-poo'd it.  Now Bush wants to grow the military.

His words on the campaign trail mean nothing to me when they are contradicted by a 20 year voting history in the Senate.

Now I'm sure that the Supreme Court nominees would be different and you wouldn't like that but that is us have fundamental differences on politics.

It is not an irrelevant difference, though.  In fact, its a very important difference.

But tell me what exactly you think Gore or Kerry would have done worse than Bush.

I think taxes would be higher.  Gore campaigned against Bush's tax cuts and Kerry campaigned on repealing them.

I think the budget would be more bloated, and I think the rabid spending from the new Democratic Congress ($21 billion in earmarks on just one bill!) is proof enough that Democrats are no longer the party of Clinton and Rubin on bedget issues.  Just look at Rx drugs.  Bush's bill is bad enough, but the Democrats proposed alternative would have cost $300 billion more by their own estimates.

We'd see a resurgence of trade protectionism.  Kerry's rhetoric on trade was borderline racist.  He completed his conversion from free trader to protectionist by voting against CAFTA.  His rabid opposition to closer trade ties with India would have harmed our budding realtionship with this important country.  Our economy and diplomacy would be weakened by a President woho doesn't want to engage the world econmically and who is totally in the pocket of labor unions.

Afghanistan would be in worse shape.  Kerry talked about wiping out the opium crop, which is pretty short sighted.  Wipe out the opium and you wipe out the income of Afghan farmers, and unless you can replace that income with something you're going to find farmers suddenly more sympathetic to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.  High opium production is a small price to pay for peace in the hills outside Kandahar.

Things in Iraq would also be worse.  Kerry was not a strong leader, and could not have resisted pressure from his party to withdraw from Iraq.  We'd have retreated by now and Muqtada al-Sadr would already be the Supreme Leader of Iranian Manchuko.

And the courts.  But we already mentioned that.

[The Duke]

Do you honestly think Kerry or Gore would have prematurely announced their support for a failed coup in Venezuela (which, if you go back, was the beginning of our problems with Chavez)?

The coup was not the beginning of our problems with Chavez.  After all, if we had no problems with Chavez, why would anyone support the coup?  Obviously there were problems with Chavez before the coup, or there would not have been a coup at all!

I think Chavez is a cheap demagogue and a wannabe dictator who has steadily eroded basic liberties in Venezuela.  I oppose him and I want a President that does as well, and I'd rather have a President who does the right thing poorly than does the wrong thing well.

Chavez is a dictator.  But he didn't start causing problems for the US UNTIL the failed coup.  The reason for the failed coup was an attempt to export democracy.  And it failed.  And now we've got a major oil producing nation that hates our guts.

I don't think Chavez is causing us that much in the way of problems.  He is basically a demagogue who trashes the US for domestic consumption, but at the end of the day his power base is built on selling oil to the Americans and using the profits to bribe voters to support him with large and totally unsustainable welfare benefits.  So he sells us the oil.

This is something that doesn't get mentioned enough when talking about Venezuela: Chavez may not like us, but he is completely dependent on us and I see no reason to think he's going to stop doing the only thing we need him to do which is sell us oil, failed coup plot or not.

Do you think Kerry or Gore would have allowed Congress to do whatever without challenging it with a veto or 2?

Actually, I think Congress would be even more inclined to run amok.  With a Gore or a Kerry who actively encourages their spendthrift ways, of course the budget would be in worse shape.  Never trust a Democrat to run a budget unless the Democrat's name is Bill Clinton.

Umm ... Gore was Clinton's VP so I suspect he would have followed Clinton's budgetary success.  But the key point here is that Kerry/Gore would have actually veto'd some of the Congressional pork bills (if for no other reason that to spite their Republican adversaries).  Bush, on the other hand, has provided no leadership when it comes to Congress.  He has literally let them do anything they want without challenging them.

Bush's father was Reagan's VP, but obviously didn't follow Reagan's tax policies.  Gore wasn't going to follow Clinton's budget policies just because he had once been Clinton's VP.  His record in Congress was one of a tax hiking, big spending populist and his campaign platform was built around a series of massive government spending projects.  He'd have spent a lot of money if elected.

Given the fact that the Democratic Congress has shown themselves even more inclined to pork barrel spending than their Republican predecessors, I don't know how you can, with a straight face, continue to say that if John Kerry or Al Gore had won there would be less pork.

FEMA under Bill Clinton was hailed as a great success.  You would have to believe that Gore or Kerry would have recruited veterans from that team who would have handled Katrina A LOT better.

I think this is a bit of fantasy.  There were two reasons Katrina was such a disaster:

1) A hurricane hit a city that was 20 feet below sea level.
2) First responders abandoned their posts.

FEMA can't stop either of those things.  Mike Brown is a dope, but even a managerial genius would have wilted under the circumstances.  Bush's FEMA did just fine handling three hurricanes hitting Florida in one season in 2004.  Managerial competence is not the issue, scale of the disaster is the issue and anyone who thinks Katrina would have turned out differently if only a Democrat had been President is holding a belief based totally on faith.

Blaming Bush for Katrina is like blaming Doc Rivers for the Celtics poor win loss record.  Doc Rivers may be a crummy coach, but that isn't the reason the Celtics are losing.

I call BS on this one.  Katrina was a terrible storm.  But the real disaster came in the wake of the storm when the dams broke and relief didn't come.

Relief didn't come for several reasons.

1. There was political grandstanding between Democrats and Republicans (local and national officials).  A Gore/Kerry White House eliminates that garbage.

2. There was poor management of resources by FEMA.  The veterans of Clinton FEMA would have done better I believe.  Part of this was also because Bush was on vacation when it happened.  And the day after he was at a V-J Day celebration.  Everyone knew that storm was coming.  When a major American city is evacuated most Presidents would make it a top priority to monitor the situation.

3. National Guardsmen, who typically help locals to respond, were in short supply due to overcommittment in Iraq.  A Gore admin wouldn't have been in Iraq.  A Kerry admin would have grown the military.

You're right that Bush was at a V-J Day celebration, and had he been on TV warning people he would have been seen much differently.  In fact, I think this was his key mistake in the storm.  Had he been on TV and at the White House, he'd have looked fine, but he was at a barbecue, so he looked bad.  But to me, this is a perception issue, not a substantive one.  If Bush had been on TV telling everyone to get out of New Orleans, would anything have turned out differently?  I don't think so, and I don't think anyone who wasn't persuaded by the Mayor and Governor to leave was not going to be persuaded by the President.

I've already said I don't believe for a second that a Kerry administration would have grown the military.

Only a small portion of the Louisiana National Guard was Iraq.

Governor Blanco did not, in my view, refuse to Federalize the Guard for partisan regions as much as regional ones.  Southern Governors are typically slower to Federalize the Guard than Governors from other regions.  This is true regardless of party.  And even if the Governor of Louisiana did refuse to Federalize the Guard because of her party, is that really an argument against Bush or an argument against Blanco?  I think its an argument against Blanco and an argument that Bush was less responsible for what happened than you think he is.

Most people who work for FEMA are career civil servants without a loyalty to any administration, and these civil servants remained essentially the same people who staffed FEMA under Clinton.

Bush's FEMA was just fine at handling hurricanes in Florida.  They didn't get the "incompetent" label until Katrina.  The reason they looked incompetent after Katrina is because Katrina was such a massive catastrophe that it could not have ended well no matter who was President.

Here's the thing, and there's really no way around it: If Bush's people were so incompetent, why is it that there was no sign of incompetence at FEMA until Katrina?  There were plenty of disasters that could have exposed incompetence before Katrina, but no such thing happened.  Why did everything work fine for over four years until Katrina if these guys were incompetent at disaster management all along?

John Kerry said during the campaign that he wanted to grow the military and Bush poo-poo'd it.  Now Bush wants to grow the military.

His words on the campaign trail mean nothing to me when they are contradicted by a 20 year voting history in the Senate.

Oh I see, so we're going to disregard a very public plan because it doesn't help your argument.  That's ridiculous man.  I'll conceed that Dems are known for cutting back on spending on advanced military technology.  But the whole point behind Kerry arguing was that we're overcommitted militarily around the world and that the only way to ease the demand on our troops is to add more of them.

I disregard what I believe to be a blatant lie whose only purpose is to make a candidate who is weak on defense nominated by a party that is weak on defense and who is running in the middle of a war look like he is not weak on defense.

Don't watch what they say, watch what they do.

If Kerry had a long record of being a Sam Nunn on defense issues, he'd be credible when proposing a larger military.  But he does not have Sam Nunn's record, and I have to believe he was making a promise he had no intention of keeping.

And for the record, Bush is wrong not to enlarge the military after 9/11.

The computer is telling me my response is too long, so part II is in the next post.

[The Duke]

But tell me what exactly you think Gore or Kerry would have done worse than Bush.

I think taxes would be higher.  Gore campaigned against Bush's tax cuts and Kerry campaigned on repealing them.

Yeah, they would be.  But then again the budget deficit wouldn't be so high.

After Bush raised taxes in 1990, the deficit grew for three straight years.  Raising taxes doesn't fix your budget problem if you help induce a recession (In Gore's case he'd be deepening a recession that was already going to happen in 2001 anyway).

I don't think it's likely that raising taxes strengthens the budget if it deepens a recession and shrinks your tax base.  It certainly didn't fix the budget in 1990.

I think the budget would be more bloated, and I think the rabid spending from the new Democratic Congress ($21 billion in earmarks on just one bill!) is proof enough that Democrats are no longer the party of Clinton and Rubin on bedget issues.  Just look at Rx drugs.  Bush's bill is bad enough, but the Democrats proposed alternative would have cost $300 billion more by their own estimates.

I disagree.  The only time we've had a reasonable budget is when we had a Dem White House and a Republican Congress.

That's not accurate.  We've had reasonable budgets in the past with far different arrangements than the split government of the 1990s.

Afghanistan would be in worse shape.  Kerry talked about wiping out the opium crop, which is pretty short sighted.  Wipe out the opium and you wipe out the income of Afghan farmers, and unless you can replace that income with something you're going to find farmers suddenly more sympathetic to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.  High opium production is a small price to pay for peace in the hills outside Kandahar.

Truth be told, there's no way to wipe out the opium crop in Afghanistan.

But there is a way to alienate rural farmers without accomplishing anything productive, and Senator Kerry found it.

Things in Iraq would also be worse.  Kerry was not a strong leader, and could not have resisted pressure from his party to withdraw from Iraq.  We'd have retreated by now and Muqtada al-Sadr would already be the Supreme Leader of Iranian Manchuko.

Umm ... no.  Bush is not a strong leader.  He's just a stubborn fool who refuses input from others.  Kerry would probably be in the process of pulling us out of Iraq.  But we would have wider committment from international forces.

The "wider commitment from international forces" seems unrealistic.  I see no reason to think that John Kerry could have gotten troop commitments from anyone who wasn't already there.  This is a sort of Deus ex machine, an implausible resolution to an intractable problem.

While Bush is stubborn and a fool, that doesn't refute the point that Kerry is still weak.  He repeatedly showed he was unable to resist pressure from his party's base, most famously in his vote on the $87 billion supplemental in 2004.  He backed the supplemental until he realized Howard Dean was gaining in primary states, and he promptly switched sides.  Does anyone have a reason that would convince me that once elected, Kerry would no longer be willing to kowtow to his fringe base given that he had spent over 20 years kowtowing to that very base?

[The Duke]

Chavez
He's happily driving up the price of oil by withholding sales to the US and selling to India and China.  He's far from dependent on us.

He is one of our top sources of oil.  It is simply false to say he's withholding sales from us.

Gore/Bush Taxes & Budgets
Well, conservatives on here are fond of pointing out that HW Bush was pushed into breaking his "no new taxes" pledge.  The simple truth is that Reagan took the top tax bracket down from 70% to 33%.  There really isn't that much more to amend the income tax system.

I don't know how you can honestly believe that a Democratic President and Republican Congress would cooperate to spend more than a single party government (especially one where the President NEVER veto'd a single bill).  If you honestly believe that you are either stubbornly partisan OR totally mad.

And I think its partisan for you to deny that the party of bigger government actually wants bigger government.

Katrina
When the White House finally dumped Michael Brown is when things turned around.  If the President hadn't been vacationing that would have happened sooner.

We'll have to agree to disagree regarding the size of the military.  Personally I think you are being stubbornly partisan in refusing to believe that Kerry would have done it.

Again, you are living in a partisan fantasy world when you ignore John Kerry's 20 year voting record and say he'd have enlarged the military.

Regardless of whether the lack of cooperation between federal and state officials was Bush's fault or Blanco's fault ... it happened.  And it probably wouldn't have happened if Kerry were in office OR if a Republican had been Gov of LA.  It is what it is.

So your argument boils down to "Kerry would have benefitted from the crippling partisanship of kathleen Blanco so he'd be a better President."?

That is, to put it mildly, perverse.

The difference between administrations effects on FEMA is at the top.  It is in leadership and coordination between officials.

Like, say, coordination between the Governor of Louisiana and the President?

Kerry Growing the Military
Again, I think you are being blatantly obstinent.  So you don't believe Kerry would have enlarged the military.  So what do you think he would have done regarding Iraq?  His stated policy was not to pull out but rather to share the committment with international forces.  It is no skin off his nose to grow the military now that he is Commander-in-Chief.

This is the problem with your whole debating style, Wakie.  I don't agree with you so I'm obstinant?

Look, the guy has a 20 year record of voting to cut defense budgets, to eliminate whole weapon systems, slash the size of the Navy , and shrink the size of the Army.  You call me partisan and then ask me to take John Kerry at his word when he makes a campaign promise to do something that is the exact opposite of what he's been doing since he got to the Senate.  I am not willing to make the leap of faith that you make.  unlike you, I don't just take a politicians word for it, I make him show me he's telling the truth through his voting record.

If you actually go back throw the votes, Kerry voted against new weapons systems but he never votes against enlarging the military.

Actually, he did vote for a smaller military.  By voting for several omnibus appropriations bills in the 1990s that reduced the size of the army without protest he did indeed vote to reduce the size of the army.

Tax Policy's Impact On Deficits
In order to have a significant impact on the economy with tax policy you have to make a dramatic cut that has broad impact (such as moving the top tax bracket down almost 40%).  Bush's slight raise didn't cause the recession.  The recession came from the long-term deficits raising interest rates.  The greatest economic minds of our time, Alan Greenspan, Warren Buffet, George Akerlof, etc all agree that long-term deficits are bad.

That "slight" raise was a $137 billion tax increase.  Now you know why I don't trust Democrats on taxes, they call a $137 billion tax hike "slight" and then claim it has no effect on the economy.

Interest rates during Bush's term were fairly stable, but fell during the course of his four years.  So no, there wasn't a recession because of rising interest rates from deficit spending.

And even if deficits had been driving up interest rates, Bush's tax increase was followed by even larger deficits than before he raised taxes!  How can his tax increase be beneficial to the economy if it does nothing to shrink the deficit?

Of course I think big deficits are bad over a long period of time, and that's one of the reasons Bush's tax increase was such a failure: It did not reduce the deficit.  It simply did not.

Afghan Opium Crop Destruction
You argue that Kerry wouldn't grow military but you do think he would try to destroy the opium crop.  Ok, there simply is no way America can actually destroy the entire opium crop.  Even if we wanted to do that we'd have to get the agreement of the Afghan government and they would argue against it.

What I'm saying is Kerry wanted to send troops out into the Afghan countryside to wipe out opium fields.  I don't think he could have succeeded in destroying the opium crop, but his policy still would have generated huge resentment among Afghan farmers.

If you're going to have high opium production, at least make sure you have happy farmers.  if you're going to have angry farmers, make sure its because there's no opium.  But as you say Kerry's policy could not have hoped to succeed at wiping out the opium production.  The Kerry policy would have produced the worst of both worlds: It leaves us with angry rural farmers suddenly sympathetic to the Taliban without making a dent in opium production.

Wider Committment of Other Nations in Iraq
The reason why Kerry would be able to get wider international support is because he wanted to open up the rebuilding contracts to international firms.  If there is no economic reason to support a project, why would you expect foreign powers to put their troops behind it?

You think France is going to send ground troops into Iraq, a move that would have been wildly unpopular at home, because billion dollar French companies would have gotten to bid on reconstruction contracts?  That is totally implauible.  It reconfirms my view that you believ in a Deus ex machina solution for Iraq under a Kerry Presidency, a totally implausible solution to an otherwise intractible problem.

We were never going to get French or German troops into Iraq because they didn't want their kids dying in Mesopotamia and didn't think we should have waged the war in the first place.  It had nothing to do with reconstruction contracts, and believing otherwise is self delusion of the first order.